Data Applications Engineer

Key Skills

Python Programming, SQL, AWS, Scala Programming, Machine learning techniques, Kubernetes-K8s, AI technology, Terraform

Job Description

The Data team is responsible for driving the adoption of data driven decision making across Xero - for both our internal users and our global audience of small business owners, bookkeepers and accountants. We create, manage and deliver a wide range of data services including machine learning toolsets, frameworks API prediction services, core reporting, key data dimensions, extensible and scalable analytical data processing and storage facilities. We are the center of expertise for data architecture, data modeling, machine learning, ethical data usage and artificial intelligence service design. We also lead the work to raise the data and AI literacy levels across Xero with a particular focus on the product management and engineering cohorts globally.

About the role:

As an Applications Engineer in the Data team you will work closely with Applied Scientists, and Data Engineers to design and build the data pipelines and applications that will enable Xero to bring intelligent, insightful products and beautiful experiences to millions of customers around the world. You will have a strong interest in building Machine Learning applications that can run and evolve at scale leveraging microservices and the latest technologies.

What you'll do:

• Collaborate with colleagues from the Science, Evaluation & Measurement and Data Enrichment teams to build end-to-end machine learning pipelines for training and inference at scale.
• Monitor, maintain and support the solutions you build including being part of an on-call roster should an urgent issue come up.
• Work with colleagues to maintain and operate the Data team’s pipelines, with an emphasis on monitoring for changes in data quality.
• From ideation to production enable the development of easy-to-use infrastructure, tooling and monitoring for data applications and reproducible data science workflows.
• Stay current with emerging practices, techniques and frameworks in the fields of applied machine learning and artificial intelligence at scale.
• Mentor and develop members of your team, increasing our capability to build and operate intelligent, data-driven, products and services in our core customer offerings.
• Champion the ethical development of data processing systems which include ML/AI components and ensure your teams are always working with the best interests of our users in mind.

What you'll bring with you…

• Track record of solving customers' problems through software.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Appreciation of best practices for building production-grade maintainable web services.
• Experience coding in production and knowledge of application architecture.
• Proven experience in operating at an intermediate technical level.
• Experience working within commercial software development teams.
• Understanding of SQL and designing data models.
• Working with infrastructure as code eg: CloudFormation, Terraform, Kubernetes.
• Demonstrable experience in developing both training and inference systems for machine learning pipelines at scale.